Walking in the Word with Breast Cancer

7 Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God.8 Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love. - 1 John 4:7-8 According to this verse, our lack of love demonstrates that we do not have intimate fellowship with God. We may consider ourselves Christians because we have surrendered our lives, but we are not filled with His Spirit if we cannot show love in difficult circumstances. If it’s hard for us, we need to pause and be still - there is something that is blocking God’s filling. In that quiet, we need to ask God to reveal to us what is the sin issue that is blocking our filling. Uncovering the sin, and confessing and repenting of that sin is that to be filled with the Spirit. If we are struggling to love a difficult person or in a difficult situation, we can be sure there is some unrepentant sin issue in our hearts.  God is love. The very nature of God is love. All that He does is love. When...

7 Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. 8 Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love. - 1 John 4:7-8 If it were easy to love, we wouldn’t need this command. We wouldn’t need God’s example or this powerful exhortation to love one another. The world teaches us to love those who love us, but God calls us to love even our enemies. It’s easy to love those who are lovable, but God calls us to display His love to everyone.  We may live with a difficult spouse, have a challenging family member, work with a rude co-worker - and God calls us to love them all with the love He has given us. John is essentially saying in this passage, “Beloved, if God so loved you, you ought to love that difficult person.” When we try to do this in our own power, we fail. Our hearts are too selfish to see past our own needs and place another over ourselves. But it is in these difficult situations that God’s...

8 Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love. 9 In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. - 1 John 4:8-9 There is a reason we find these exhortations about love all over scripture - this is something we need to get right, yet a place where we so often fail. If we get this one thing right, if we learn how to truly love God and one another, then nothing else really matters. This is the big revelation from Scripture, this is the big take away God wants you to have. Everything else He says in scripture stem from this one thing. If we are loving God and loving others above ourselves, we’ve got it right. But if we are not, we are standing in the way of He blessings God wants to pour into our lives.  Biblical love is a self-sacrificing, caring commitment that shows itself in seeking the best for another person.  It delights in seeking the best for another. This is e...

John says "Love one another," he says. Love is not to be only for those who are pleasant to us, or who are nice, congenial, clever people. We are not to love because people are lovable, but because each is “another.”  Everyone is a person, created by our Father in heaven for a unique purpose, capable of an intimate relationship with God. In fact, it is His desire that every one of us bow our hearts to Him and accept Him as our Savior.  People are meant to be loved.  They are not meant to be dealt with impersonally, or to be opposed or accepted as it suits our purpose, but they are to be treated as a living, breathing, searching creation of God, just like us. That is why we are to love one another, without regard to what that person is like. This defines what love is meant when the Bible talks about love. True love is an interest in and a concern for another person, just because he is a person, and for no other reason.  The problem enters when our sinful, jud...

8 Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love. 9 In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. - 1 John 4:8-9 God tells us in this passage if we love one another, He will dwell in us, and that His love is perfected in us. His perfect love, not our imperfect love.  So even though Adam and Eve were the epitome of imperfection, their imperfection was made perfect in their love for one another. No matter how flawed they were, their marriage was created in perfect love because the Master created it and He dwelt within the midst.  The marriage or the relationships you are in were hand picked by God especially for you. Think about that for a minute. God is sovereign over all - He chose the people you live your life with, from the person you’re married to, to that difficult co-worker. He selected then all for you. And He did it to bring you to a deeper understanding o...

7 Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. 8 Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love. - 1 John 4:7-8 What a desolate world this is apart from the great warmth of love. How empty life would be if we did not know love. God alone is the source of love, the only kind of love that truly satisfies, the only kind that meets the hunger of our hearts.  We spend so much time looking for His love in the wrong places - in things, in other people - and, as a result, we spend a great deal of time disappointed and hurt. God created each of us with a deep desire to be loved - that is why we spend so much energy searching for love, that is why our expectations that others satisfy our needs is so great. And when those things or those people fail to meet our expectations, we end up deeply discouraged. We’re looking for the wrong thing to fill our hearts.  He alone satisfies our heart. He cre...

34 A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another. 35 By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another." - John 13:34-35 In Matthew 22:40c, Jesus said, "On these two commandments hang all the law and prophets."  These two commandments - love your God and love your neighbor - are everything. If we understand and obey these two commandments, we understand everything that Jesus was trying to teach. Every part of our heart that God works to transform, every trial He allows us to walk through, everything He wants to do in our lives, it all boils down to these two commandments - God wants us to be people who fervently love God and fervently love other people. Every single thing God teaches us in scripture flows from these two commandments - love Him and love each other. How can we not give them top priority?   Christians can spend so much energy on so many...

34 A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another. 35 By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another." - John 13:34-35 God’s love is full of mercy and grace.  Mercy is not giving us what we deserve, and grace is giving us what we don’t deserve.  God’s mercy flows out of the great love with which he loved us. This divine mercy is personal, intimate, and completely unexpected. God is merciful out of His abundant stores, and lovingly and consistently pours mercy over our lives. Every heartbeat, every breath, every hour you have is not only a gracious gift from God, it is also a reminder that God has mercifully kept death at bay. God’s mercy can cover even the worst of sins. God loves us unconditionally, forgives us our many trips and falls in life, and helps us back to our feet as often as necessary. God’s mercy is rich and endless.  Now think abou...

34 A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another. 35 By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another." - John 13:34-35 If we are to love like He does, we need to understand His love for us, and using that as a yardstick to ever deepen our love for others.  We know His love for us is first and foremost sacrificial, but when we examine scripture, we find so many other qualities of His love.   His love for us is steadfast. One of may favorite verses in all of scripture is 21 But this I call to mind, and therefore I have hope: 22 The steadfast love of the LORD never ceases; his mercies never come to an end;  - Lamentations 3:21-22.  His steadfast love is what brings me hope. We could define steadfastness as having a firm loyalty or constant and unswerving dedication to something or someone. It is fixed or unchanging and solidly established so stead...

34 A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another. 35 By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another." - John 13:34-35 Jesus commands us in these verses to love like He does, so it would benefit us to take some time to reflect on how He loves.  Jesus loves us sacrificially. He placed us before Him as He endured the wrongful accusations, the mocking, and even the beatings without a word, and as He went to the cross to take our punishment for us, all so we could live in community with Him for all of eternity. Do we love others with the same “you before me” mentality?  When we are prompted to say “I love you” to someone, it is generally because they recently made us feel good. Someone does a nice thing for us and we say “I love you”.  We don’t generally say “I love you” when they’re being difficult, when they’re wrongly accusing us, when they’re mo...

34 A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another. 35 By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another." - John 13:34-35 In this world, we tend to love when we delight in another person.  We love when a person has attractive qualities, when they think like us, or when they do kind things for us. It’s easy to love people who make us feel good about ourselves, but these aren't the people Jesus is referring to when He gives us this commandment. He knows we already love the easy people in our lives well.  He wants us to love the difficult people. Biblical love is not a delight in who a person is, it is a deeply felt commitment to helping the people in our lives be what they ought to be - a loved child of God. So how do we do that?  How do we help the people that God placed in our lives and lead them to Christ?  How do we specifically help those diffi...

34 A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another. 35 By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another." - John 13:34-35 Love is so vitally important to Jesus that He commands us to love one another. Pause and think about that. Faith is important, prayer is important, taking care of the widow and the orphan are important, tithing is important...but love is what He commands us to do over everything else just a few short hours before He goes to the cross. Love. It's the most important thing.  And not just that we should love Him - that's the easy part. Loving a perfect God takes a leap of faith at times, but He is always faithful to respond perfectly. He blesses us with peace, understanding, wisdom, guidance, He protects us, provides for us, and He never lets us down. Loving Him is easy.  He commanded us to love one another - that's the hard part...

37 And he said to him, "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. 38 This is the great and first commandment. 39 And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. - Matthew 22:37-39 The command to love your neighbor as yourself is not meant for those who are pleasant to us.  Let’s be real. We are not called to love because people are lovable, but God commands us to love because He knows what selfishness lives in our hearts. He knows how we struggle with contempt and expectations.  He knows how we fail to love.  Here’s why we are to love - every person is an individual, created by our Father in heaven and capable of a unique relationship to God.  They are not a thing to be dealt with impersonally, or to be opposed or accepted as it suits our purpose, but they should be treated as a living, breathing, searching creation of God, just like us. That is why we are to love one another....

37 And he said to him, "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. 38 This is the great and first commandment. 39 And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. - Matthew 22:37-39 Love your neighbor as yourself. Considering this verse with the command to love God before all else, and we begin to understand how we are incapable of loving others as much as we love ourselves if we don't love Him before all else. It is only when God is in His rightful place in my heart that I can place other people in their rightful place in my life. Without Him first, without humbly coming before Him daily and surrendering my own agenda for His will, I will continue to put myself first - and that will eventually get in the way of every single relationship in my life.  Our lack of love for God is revealed in our lives by the lack of active love in our relationships. In other words, we can measure our love for...

37 And he said to him, "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. 38 This is the great and first commandment. 39 And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. - Matthew 22:37-40 As if loving our God with all of our emotions, with all of our passions and desires, and with all of our intellectual abilities isn’t not challenging enough, the second commandment pushes us even further. Love your neighbor as yourself.  So, exactly what does this mean?  I love myself by taking care of my needs and thinking about myself all the time - from what I want to eat for breakfast to how I will exercise my body. I plan my schedule around what I need and want to do today, I think about my feelings, and make choices that please me or validate me. I take into consideration all my experiences when making decisions - from my past hurts to my challenging day, and I choose what feels best to me.  I spend a...

37 And he said to him, "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. 38 This is the great and first commandment. 39 And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. 40 On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets." - Matthew 22:37-40 Loving God with all of my mind is using all of my intellectual capacity to love Him. I remember being a new Christian, and being intimidated by the wealth of biblical knowledge that the people around me seemed to possess. Outside of the major stories that everyone knew - creation, the flood, Moses, Jonah, and Jesus - I didn’t know much about the Bible.  Interestingly, it took me years to actually open scripture regularly on my own - I was so intimated by the book that I didn’t even know where to begin. Sadly, I was also fairly prideful and didn’t want to look as if I didn’t have as much biblical knowledge as the next person, so rather than see...

37 And he said to him, "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. 38 This is the great and first commandment. 39 And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. 40 On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets." - Matthew 22:37-40 Loving God with all our soul is referring to everything we’ve got. Our souls makes us who we are - it’s the sum total of everything that makes us. The soul is what integrates our parts, it is the gathering of it all together - our mind, our emotions, our strengths.  These parts of us don’t exist separately, they exist together - and they are all pulled together by our soul.  So, we are to love God with all that we are. We are to love Him with our passions and desires, our thoughts and our actions. Everything. We are to love Him with how we talk, how we use our talents, how we interact with others, how we respond to challenges. Everything. Ever...

37 And he said to him, "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. 38 This is the great and first commandment. 39 And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. 40 On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets." - Matthew 22:37-40 This all-in command - love the Lord your God with ALL your heart and with ALL your soul and with ALL your mind - leaves no room for divided affections. All means all, every part of you. Jesus said, “No one can serve two masters” (Matthew 6:24). God demand our total loyalty, above everything that our heart holds dear.  Those things that come before God are our idols. We were created to worship, the problem is we have such a tendency to worship the wrong thing. We worship when we place importance on something by giving it our attention over other things. When you think about your week, or even your day, what do you spend the majority of your tim...

37 And he said to him, "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. 38 This is the great and first commandment. 39 And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. 40 On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets." - Matthew 22:37-40 Our hearts are the center of our passions and our emotions, so loving God with all my heart is accessing the emotional part of me. When I passionately pour out my heart in prayer to God, when I am moved to tears during worship, when I long to cuddle up with His Word, when I am excited to share my testimony with others, I am loving God with all my heart. Many of my days, I am filled with these passions for Him and I know I am loving God with my whole heart, but there are those days when it’s a struggle. There are times when I’m distracted by all that life has to offer and I go through the motions without being moved. When I catch myself caught in t...

37 And he said to him, "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. 38 This is the great and first commandment. 39 And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. - Matthew 22:37-39 There is little that demonstrates our desperate need for grace than these two commandments:  love your God and love your neighbor. If we’re being honest with ourselves, nothing exposes the darkness of our hearts quite like being called to love. There are so many ways we fail at these every day. Loving the Lord our God with all our heart, mind, and soul - that’s everything we’ve got. We may acknowledge His existence, but does He truly have all of our heart, all of our mind, and all of our soul?  Does He come before everything in our lives?  If He did, the world would be a very different place. If I’m being honest, my own life would be significantly different. Far too often, my needs take priority, my desires...

9 Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, 10 so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, 11 and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. - Philippians 2:9-11 There is no greater name than the name of Jesus. When your words are few because you are frustrated or overwhelmed, when you’re heartbroken or devastated, when you are filled with fear or discouragement, you simply need to utter His name, and you will feel His great power. When you don’t know how to pray because the trial you face is just too much, you only need to say His name to feel His manifest presence. His name alone can save our souls, heal our wounds, protect us in battle, comfort our hearts.  Jesus is the name above all names, He is our Lord.  On our last day in meditation on this verse, my thoughts go back to my first reflections. I may not always understand ...

9 Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, 10 so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, 11 and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. - Philippians 2:9-11 Because Jesus humbled himself, God highly exalted Him. Notice Jesus did not exalt Himself as we do often do.  No, He humbled Himself and then God exalted Him. Jesus Himself taught, “For everyone who exalts himself shall be humbled, and he who humbles himself shall be exalted” (Luke 14:11).  He didn’t go to the cross because He knew God would exalt Him afterwards. He went to the cross because He loves and wanted to obey His Father, and because He loves us.  This is the model we should follow in our lives. We are to humble ourselves out of love and obedience to our Father, and we are to humble ourselves out of our love for others. Far too often, we are the ones who ...

9 Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, 10 so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, 11 and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. - Philippians 2:9-11 Many ask the question, if Jesus is exalted as Lord, then why does He allow evil and suffering?  Why do people who have confessed He is Lord endure such trials?  We don’t have a direct answer to this question, but we do know from scripture that evil reigns in this world. We also know who wins in the end.  We know God’s goodness will ultimately defeat the evil that exists in the world, and that His patience in coming is because He wants none to perish. He is using the evil in this broken world to bring each one of us to repentance. The evil that exists in this world doesn’t exist outside of each one of us, it exists within each one of us. Don’t be mistaken and think...

9 Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, 10 so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, 11 and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. - Philippians 2:9-11 Jesus was given the name above all names - He is our Lord. Every single person on this earth will acknowledge this to be true someday. Some of us have already confessed this to be true doctrinally - we say with our mouth that Jesus is Lord, but we struggle to truly bow our hearts to Him. When our hearts and our lives have been surrendered to the King, it is evident in our relationship with others.  Here is a truth I read recently —> you will only experience the mind of Christ to the degree you accept it. In other words, you need to allow the mind of Christ to fully enter your life, and you need to do so willingly if you want to experience the fullness of Christ. We have ...